Sponsored by Hudson Rock – Use Hudson Rock's free cybercrime intelligence tools to learn how Infostealer infections are leading to ransomware attacks

Enjoying ransomware.live? Help us keep tracking ransomware gangs and shipping new features. Support us

Medusa – Reboot into Safe Mode Followed by Security Service Stop

Medusa Defense Evasion Sentinel
MITRE ATT&CK
Service Stop
Data Source
DeviceProcessEvents
Date Added
2026-07-23
Last Updated
2026-07-23
Source
CISA/FBI #StopRansomware: Medusa advisory; ransomware.live group_tools dataset (medusa)
What This Detects
Medusa affiliates force a reboot into Safe Mode (where most EDR agents don't load) and then explicitly stop any surviving AV/EDR services before encrypting. Correlates bcdedit safeboot with a net/sc stop of a security-product service.
Query
let safeMode = DeviceProcessEvents
| where Timestamp > ago(1d)
| where FileName =~ "bcdedit.exe" and ProcessCommandLine has_any ("safeboot minimal","safeboot network")
| project DeviceName, SafeModeTime = Timestamp;
let svcStop = DeviceProcessEvents
| where Timestamp > ago(1d)
| where FileName in~ ("net.exe","net1.exe","sc.exe")
| where ProcessCommandLine has_any ("stop","config")
| where ProcessCommandLine has_any ("WinDefend","Sense","MBAMService","Sophos","Cortex","SepMasterService")
| project DeviceName, StopTime = Timestamp, StopCmd = ProcessCommandLine;
safeMode
| join kind=inner svcStop on DeviceName
| where StopTime - SafeModeTime between (0min .. 2h)
| project DeviceName, SafeModeTime, StopTime, StopCmd

Hunting queries are starting points for threat hunting & detection engineering — validate table/column names against your own workspace schema and tune thresholds before turning any of these into a production alert rule.